Memory Man

by David Baldacci

  believed.

  He passed by the front and opened the chain-link gate to the backyard. The color blue had initially been limited to the bodies. Now the entire property and everything within a half mile of it was blue. He had first experienced this the third time he had returned to the house, and it had been that way ever since. He could never adequately explain to anyone what it felt like to see blue grass, blue trees, blue siding on a house you knew was painted yellow. Even the blue sky felt different because all the clouds were also that color.

  He eyed the tree in the back and the swing dangling from it. He’d put that up himself because Molly had wanted one. When she was little Decker would push her. Sometimes he had pushed Cassie and Molly together. It had been cheap entertainment for a young couple with little money.

  Now the rope was rotted and the long plank of wood Decker had fashioned for a seat was warped and splintered. The bank was having someone cut the grass, but it was full of weeds.

  He turned to look at the rear of the house. The back door led into a small utility room. Had that actually been how the killer had entered?

  He jimmied this door easily enough. It seemed none of the locks on the house worked very well, something that, again, caused him enormous guilt. A policeman who couldn’t even secure his own house?

  He closed the door behind him and looked around. Short flight of steps up to the kitchen. Where his brother-in-law had sat drinking beer until someone had sliced his neck from ear to ear.

  He went up the blue steps and stepped into the blue kitchen. It was full of dust and some dead insects were on the floor and on the countertops. He eyed the spot where the kitchen table had been. That’s where Johnny Sacks had been attacked.

  The blood had long since been cleaned up, but Decker remembered where every drop had been. Not red now, all blue, like the color of blood as seen inside veins through one’s skin, only a thousand times more potent.

  He passed into the next room and up the stairs. The same stairs he had taken three at a time on that night. Bouncing off walls, oblivious to whoever might have been in here harming his family.

  The mattress and box springs were gone from their bedroom. Evidence. They were at a secure storage unit maintained by the Burlington police. They might be there forever.

  Still, he clearly saw her bare foot raised up above the bed. He crossed the room and looked down and saw neon-blue Cassie on the floor. The only thing that wasn’t blue about her was the single gunshot wound to her head. Even in Decker’s altered mind it would forever be just like it actually was: black and blistered.

  He turned and left because his resistance was wearing down and he had other rooms to visit.

  He opened the bathroom door and looked at the toilet where his child had been seated, the bathrobe cord cruelly holding her dead body in place.

  Leopold had not explained that. He had just done it. Didn’t really know why. Felt right. He said. The man no one could identify. The man who wanted to plead guilty and die.

  He looked down at the spot where he had sat cross-legged with the gun first inside his mouth and then pressed against his temple. His dead daughter in front of him. He had wanted to join her, he guessed, in death. But he hadn’t pulled the trigger. The cops had come and recognized him and talked him out of the weapon. It was a wonder they hadn’t shot him. Maybe it would have been better if they had.

  He turned and walked back down the hall to the next door.

  Molly’s room. He had only been here a few times since cleaning it out after her death.

  The noise from inside caused him to stop, his hand halfway to the knob. He looked around. He had left his gun back in his room because he knew he had been going to the courthouse. He listened some more and then his tension eased. It was not human feet he was hearing.

  Scampering, tapping, tiny.

  He opened the door in time to see a rat disappear into a hole in the drywall.

  He could recall every stick of furniture, the placement of every stuffed animal, the location of each book, for Molly had been a voracious reader.

  Decker had been about to fully enter the room when he stopped and stiffened. There was something here that his perfect memory did not recall, and with good reason. Because it had not been here the last time Decker had been in this room.

  On the wall, written in red block letters.

  We are so much alike, Amos. So much. Like brothers. Do you have a brother? Of course you don’t. I checked. Sisters, yes, but no brother. So can I be yours? We’re really all the other has now. We need each other.

  He read through this message three times. He wanted to dig beneath the words and discover the author. But the more he stared at the words, the more unsettled he became. The person had come back here. Had come back here to write this message to him. This was not about some perceived slight at a 7-Eleven. This was deeply personal with Decker.

  As the message had said, Decker had no brother. He had two sisters. Long since moved away. One in California with her Army husband and four kids. The other was in Alaska, childless but prospering and enjoying life with her oil executive husband. They had come for the funerals and then had gone back home. He had not spoken to them since. His fault. They had tried. Repeatedly. He had rebuffed. Repeatedly.

  But still, he had to make sure. Whoever had written this message had done his homework. Sisters.

  He slowly pulled his phone from his pocket and texted each of them. He waited, waited, waited. Then a pop on his phone. California sister was fine and happy to hear from him.

  Two minutes later he hadn’t moved. It was even earlier in Alaska. Maybe she wasn’t up—

  Another pop. His sister from Fairbanks had texted. She was fine. To please call when he got a chance.

  He punched in another number and waited for the person to answer.

  “Lancaster,” the voice said.

  Decker said, “Mary, you need to see something. And you need to see it now.”

  Chapter

  19

  LANCASTER HAD COME. Then Captain Miller. Then the uniforms. Then the forensics team with all its bags of gadgets. It was like that night all over again, only he wasn’t staring at his dead daughter while holding a gun against his head.

  The message had been written with a red Sharpie. The ink dried almost immediately, and there was no telling how long it had been there. Thus Leopold was not in the clear. He had only been locked up since very early yesterday morning.

  Miller had wanted to know how the killer would have known Decker would come back here, enter this room, and see this message.

  “I’ve been back here before,” admitted Decker.

  “And you went inside each time,” said Lancaster.

  “Not every time, no. I couldn’t…every time.”

  “When was the last time you were in this room?” asked Lancaster.

  “Four weeks and three days ago, right about this time.”

  “So at least we have a time window to work with,” noted Lancaster.

  “Maybe this guy has been following you and knows you come here,” said Miller. “That’s why he put this message up.”

  “We can canvass the neighborhood, see if anyone saw something,” said Lancaster.

  “They didn’t see who murdered three people,” countered Decker. “I don’t see why they would have seen the person who did this.”

  “But still,” replied Miller. “We’re going to do it.”

  “Brothers?” said Lancaster curiously as a police photographer took shots of the message. “We might want to get a shrink in on this to analyze what’s going on inside the dude’s head.”

  “So you think this is Leopold’s work?” asked Miller. He was staring at the graffiti like it was part of an inscription on the doorway to hell.

  Decker said nothing because he had nothing to say. In his head the words were indeed a flaming red, thus not so far away from hell. Whoever had written this was either being straightforward, at least in a deranged way, or else he was

playing head games with him. Decker turned and left, ignoring Lancaster’s calling after him.

  He never saw Miller grab Lancaster by the arm. He didn’t hear his old captain tell her to let him be. He didn’t hear Lancaster’s retort, and then Miller’s request sharpen into a direct order for her to stand down.

  They both watched him from the window striding down the sidewalk with a purpose. He soon turned the corner and was gone from their sight.

  Decker didn’t stop walking until he reached the 7-Eleven on DeSalle at Fourteenth. This marked the first time in his life he had not traveled there by car.

  There were no cars parked in front. He opened the door, heard the bell tinkle, and then let it close behind him.

  There was a woman behind the counter. She was short but looked taller because of the elevated floor there. Her hair was dark and straight, falling to her shoulders. She looked Latina. She had on a beige long-sleeved blouse with a bra strap showing on one side. She was around fifty and her eye sockets were starting to recede into her face like a pond starting to dry up. A large dark mole was on her left cheek. She had some sheets of paper in front of her and was studying them and then counting off packs of cigarettes shelved in slots overhead.

  A man appeared from down one aisle. He had a mop in hand and was using it to steer a bucket with soapy water in it. Decker ran his gaze over him, his police training guiding his eye to certain vital statistics. He was white, midthirties, an inch under six feet, very lean and wiry, with narrow shoulders. His short-sleeved shirt showed off the veins in his arms. His hair was brown and curly and fell like apple peelings across his head.

  The woman looked up at him just standing there in the doorway. “Can I help you?” she asked. She had no accent.

  He came forward and took his phone from his pocket. He hit a couple buttons and held it up.

  “You ever see this guy before?”

  She looked at the photo of Sebastian Leopold. “Who is he?” she asked.

  “Some guy that either might have worked here once or hung around here at some point.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t remember seeing him. Why you want to know?” Decker fished out his PI license and flashed it in front of her. “I’m trying to find him. He might be due some money. Got a line on him that brought me here. How about your friend over there?”

  He looked at the man who was leaning on his mop and studying him quizzically.

  The woman said, “Billy, you want to look at this picture?”

  Billy parked his mop and bucket against a rack of candy bars, wiped his hands on his faded jeans, and ambled over. He looked pleased to have an excuse to stop cleaning the linoleum.

  He looked at the photo and then shook his head. “Nope. Don’t look familiar to me. Weird-looking dude. Spacey.”

  Decker lowered the phone. “How long have you two been here?”

  The woman said, “Nearly six months for me. Billy came just a few weeks ago.”

  Decker nodded. Too recent, then. “And the people here before you?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. There was a woman, a couple of men. Turnover is high here. The pay is not very good. And the hours are long. I wouldn’t be here if I could find something better. But the job market sucks,” she added bluntly.

  Decker looked at Billy. “You?”

  Billy grinned. “I don’t know nuthin’ ’bout this place. Just drawing a paycheck, man. Beer money on the weekends. Looking to have a good time with the ladies. Need cash for all that.”

  He went back to his mopping.

  “I’m sorry we can’t help you,” said the woman.

  “Part of the job,” said Decker. “Thanks.”

  He turned and left.

  His phone buzzed. He looked at it.

  Lancaster.

  He put it away without answering.

  It rang again.

  He looked at it again.

  Lancaster.

  He sighed, hit the answer button.

  “Yeah?”

  “Amos?”

  Decker immediately went rigid. Lancaster sounded nearly hysterical. And she wasn’t the type ever to do so.

  “Mary, what is it? Not another shooting?” Decker had been worried about this from the start. Things about the attack at Mansfield had made him believe that the guy was—

  “No,” she said breathlessly. “But, but there’s some-something—”

  “Where are you?” he interrupted.

  “At Mansfield.”

  “So it has to do with Mansfield? You found some—”

  “Amos!” she shrieked. “Just let me finish.”

  Decker fell silent, waited. It was as though he could hear her heart beating from across the digital ether.

  “We ran ballistics on the pistol used at Mansfield.”

  “And what did—”

  Interrupting, she said, “And we found a match.”

  His grip tightened around the phone. “A match? To what?”

  “To the gun that killed your wife.”

  Chapter

  20

  A .45 ROUND.

  Semi-jacketed. Hollow-point.

  An SJH, in ballistics shorthand.

  It was a brutally efficient piece of ordnance. Not exactly a dum-dum, named after Dum-Dum, India, where a British army officer had invented a bullet that mushroomed out on impact and acted as a miniature wrecking ball inside the body.

  Innovation wasn’t always good for you.

  The .45 SJH had blown right through the front of Cassie Decker’s skull and ended up lodged deep in her brain. It had been dug out of her during the autopsy and the slug preserved as evidence in her murder investigation. It had retained enough of its shape and lands and grooves to one day be matched to the weapon that had fired it. Well, they didn’t have the weapon, but they had something else.

  Now they knew that the very same pistol that had fired the bullet ending Cassie Decker’s life had also terminated the lives of half the victims at Mansfield. The other half had endured the blunt force of the shotgun. The medical examiner had removed the matched round from Kramer, the gym teacher and, per normal protocol, run it through the department’s database. The hit had been immediate.

  Because of the magnitude of the finding, the FBI had run its own tests on the slug and came back with the same conclusion.

  Same gun. Ballistics didn’t lie. The grooves and lands on the bullets’ respective hides had matched like a fingerprint. And that wasn’t all. They had recovered the single bullet casing from the Deckers’ bedroom. They had compared it with several of the casings found at the school. The pinprick on the bottom of the casing where the firing pin strikes was nearly as good as a fingerprint. And it too had matched on all salient points.

  The murders of Decker’s family and the massacre at Mansfield were now inextricably connected.

  * * *

  Decker huddled in his coat as he stood outside the darkened façade of the school, enduring the driving rain pinging off his hair and burly shoulders. The case had mushroomed from Mansfield High to his home on a quiet street with symbolically an ocean’s distance in between. He had never given any thought to a connection between the two crimes. Now that fact dominated him.

  There was a chance that there were different killers. Since the -->